Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe by Ephraim Kanarfogel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe by Ephraim Kanarfogel Ahuva Liberles Ephraim Kanarfogel. Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 260 pp. In his exciting new book, Brothers from Afar, Ephraim Kanarfogel tackles one of the greatest challenges for the religious leaders of the Jewish minority in Christian Europe—the mild but constant seepage of Jews into the arms of the Christian religion, by choice or under threats and coercion. Focusing on medieval northern Europe, this book presents the diverse rabbinic approaches to apostasy and shows how these approaches were translated into rabbinic decisions. Kanarfogel also identifies the complexity of rabbinic attitudes toward individuals who sought to rejoin the Jewish community after their conversion, and how these judgments were challenged and changed over the course of the Middle Ages and in different geographic areas. This book is the conclusive outcome of the author's many years of extensive research on this subject. As the author clarifies in his introduction, this is a book about the history of Halakhah as it relates to apostasy and reversion, rather than a book about medieval converts or conversion per se. At the same time, it reveals much about actual acts of conversion and medieval converts. Drawing on an extremely impressive corpus of medieval Jewish manuscripts, many of which were previously unknown or had never been addressed, Brothers [End Page 164] from Afar examines the sources against the backdrop of the linguistic and legal context in which they were created. Throughout the monograph, the reader will find profound rabbinic discussions illuminating several aspects of the intricate religious identity of apostates. How was an apostate supposed to comprehend his or her religious affiliation according to Jewish law? Did he or she relinquish Judaism by undergoing baptism? It is important to distinguish between the social and economic distance that the Jewish community, according to its rabbinic leaders, was expected to maintain from apostates, and rabbinic expectations from the converts to continue to fulfill their obligations to their Jewish family regardless of their baptism and new religious affiliation. In this context, the act of religious immersion upon the return of a convert to the fold is justified as a communal necessity, to publicly demonstrate the return to the Jewish community, rather than as a religious requirement to overturn one's conversion. In the first chapter, "Assessing the Ashkenazi Context," Kanarfogel challenges the generally accepted thesis suggested by Jacob Katz in his work, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (1961), that Rashi was the first to understand the talmudic principle that "A Jew remains a Jew even if he has sinned grievously" (ʾaf ʿal pi she-ḥataʾ Yisraʾel hu) as holding halakhic significance for the individual Jew who converted to Christianity, rather than merely as a general attitude. Until now, it has been widely accepted that Rashi's perception of apostates as still belonging, in most respects, to the Jewish people, was an approach embraced by most rabbinic adjudicators in medieval Ashkenaz. Even though earlier scholars acknowledged that some rabbinic authorities suggested apostates should undergo ritual immersion upon their return, this position was deemed to result from a desire on the part of lay Jews to gauge the sincerity of the apostate. It was also seen as an expectation that stemmed from popular culture and served to undo the convert's previous baptism (6–8). One of the goals of Brothers from Afar is to demonstrate that some rabbinic approaches were much closer to this view than was previously thought and that ritual immersion was indeed demanded by some rabbinic authorities. Kanarfogel asserts that mid-thirteenth-century northern French Tosafists prescribed immersion for apostates returning to Judaism, in contrast to earlier scholarly claims that apostates were encouraged to return to the Jewish community without being required to undergo any special ceremony or act. In chapter 2, "Establishing Boundaries: Immersion, Repentance, and Verification," Kanarfogel paints a rich picture of medieval rabbinic scholarship by examining dozens of medieval Hebrew manuscripts dealing with halakhic questions concerning converts and conversion, closely noting and revealing variations in the choice of words and shifts in the order...